[blinkingled]

That's a vast generalization. Although cost is part of it the other side of hiring STEM graduates to do rote "Enterprise" work has its own tall challenges. You either get intelligent people that hate the job and move on or you get normal people that take time to learn, insist on doing limited things and are generally not very motivated to produce work that is vastly above the quality that you get from hiring the alternatives.

So for the managers who have to deliver working things to their clients, hiring H1B saves money and generally due to their predicament these people are more willing and flexible to work beyond their assigned loads to cover up any knowledge deficiency. From the manager's perspective it works out better.

Oh and no one cares if your code is top quality (whatever that means) - if it is reasonable quality and if it works it's all good. And that's because not many non-H1B written products they have seen are all free of problems - so why pay more for something that works equally well as the one you can pay less for?

That's basically the reality of it. The rock star US born, US educated SV programmer myth only applies to a limited section of the programmer populace - rest of us all are normal people who can get it to work reasonably well.